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Media oversight

The best of the aggregating/predictive sites (not Nate, not after this cycle) has Hillary all but an infinite certainty to win. The Pollster average gives her a six point lead, and that’s probably skewed a little low right now because of outsized influence from lowballed tracking polls, purporting to show things in a virtual tie despite Clinton’s enormous leads among everyone except old people and middle-aged rednecks. (Those lowballed polls will probably continue to creep upward, “herding” in aggregator parlance, in the remaining time, and their proprietors will claim after it’s over that they were accurate all along.) And in one-sided elections, at least recent ones, polling averages have tended to understate actual margins of victory. That being said, Senate control is not the sure thing that it should be, and the House appears to be a long shot.

Corporate media has basically placed itself on the side of the most loathsome vileness, in the person of Donald Trump. Its portrayal of Trump’s sexism, bigotry, pathological (and extremely dangerous, if elected) narcissism, and just general horrific failure as a human being as being less “newsworthy” than Hillary’s emails just leaves one flabbergasted and appalled. I mean, we know corporate media’s political “coverage” had gotten really, really bad, but this? The calculation of the reprobates in charge there is clearly that since Trump can’t win (he has, after all, made it very clear that he’ll consider media his slavish lackeys, if he‘s prez), it’s fine to continue to pander to corporate media’s own conservative base, and help to blunt any Democratic downballot wave in the process. That is despicable and corrupt to an extreme. We have to figure out how to hold corporate media accountable for it, and make it happen.

One of our missions, for sure. The title of this is paraphrased from a line of dialogue in a famous movie. 2:50 in this clip:

I’ve been known to fantasize about somehow being Harvey Keitel in that scene, and the bosses of corporate media (CM) are Brad Pitt, and I’m miraculously in a position to get in their faces and make it clear that they are g*d-damned well going to shape up, right now. But like I said, fantasy.

One of the infuriating things is that CM is so smug. They know that they own the airwaves and the newspaper printing presses, and as far as a majority of the populace are still concerned they’ll get the last word, and there’s nothing we progressives can do about it.

But the reality is that they have been getting consistently worse for decades, continuously more and more nothing but a shameless, despicable fount of plutocratic/war pig propaganda, and their behavior during this election cycle has plumbed depths more deep and vile than ever before. Is there a way to make them shape up or go under? (Is them going under even really desirable, given all of the livelihoods at stake? And most newspapers do still have worthwhile content here and there.)

OK, not entirely “drivel.” It must be acknowledged that on the whole city and country residents have tended to vote differently. (It’s been that way for a long time, though one could well get the impression from establishment punditry that the “divide” has only become really fundamental to Minnesota politics pretty recently, just as things are really starting to look demographically bleak for conservatism. Coincidence, no doubt.) But the phrase “rural/urban divide” is primarily a misleading construct being used politically, especially by corporate media, to help continue to con people into voting for conservatives.

(It actually should be “rural/metro divide.” The idea is to keep outstate residents angry at the Twin Cities metro, which supposedly gets all of the political attention and goodies, and not at places like St. Cloud and Red Wing. But since “rural/urban” has been established as the standard, albeit a (probably deliberately) misleading one, it’s what I’m using here.)

My parents grew up on farms, which stayed in the families and where close relatives still live. I’ve sometimes lived in densely populated settings, but mostly in small-town ones. I suppose that this background helps fuel my take (which, as always, is just my take, not some pretense to complete, final, and absolute truth). Which is that when you get right down to it, people – people with families in particular – pretty much have the same problems and concerns, wherever they live. And they share the same kinds of frustrations when those are not being addressed. It’s not just inner-city public school infrastructure that needs a big upgrade. And plenty of metro streets and roads also drive like something out of Wagon Train. And everyone wants good jobs, wherever they live. And so on.

If you remember much about the months before the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, it doesn’t take much paying attention to this one to work up a pretty strong sense of déjà vu. In both of those, we also saw polling from September into early October claiming that the race had “tightened” to very close, or even tied, before in the end President Obama pulled away to win by about the margins he’d had right after the Democratic conventions.

Various explanations have been mooted for this phenomenon. Here’s a certainly viable one that I saw last week:

One way to describe that problem is “non-response bias;” in other words, the responses of those who choose to respond would be different than those you choose not to respond. It’s a phenomenon that we’ve been aware of for a long time … it may have been the primary culprit in the notoriously disastrous Literary Digest poll that predicted a landslide victory for Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential race … but one that pollsters are just now starting to grapple with.

A more recent case was the polling spike that Mitt Romney received after a poor performance by Barack Obama in the first debate in 2012. Research after the fact, however, suggested that Romney didn’t suddenly get an influx of new backers, as much as Obama’s backers were demoralized and temporarily​ less willing to talk to pollsters, and Romney was temporarily winning by subtraction, which explained why that debate bump quickly wore off. Pollsters using more advanced techniques … especially Obama’s internal pollsters, who were relying on multiple levels of voter file information to sort voters, instead of just using random-digit dialing and talking to whoever answered … found that there really wasn’t much of a debate effect at all, and the race stayed in pretty much the same narrow band from April on.

And pollsters who are willing to dig a little below the surface (and not interested in feeding a horse race narrative in the media) are finding similar things this year.(David Jarman/Daily Kos)

Be that as it may, there’s another hypothesis that doesn’t seem to be being given much voice, though for me it fairly springs from the data, past and present, like a jaguar. Consider:

– Much corporate media is facing further downsizing, if not outright extinction in its current embodiments, any time. (Note, for example, the age distribution among those who still inexplicably get their “news” from the plutocratic/war pig propaganda that is the network TV broadcasts. I don‘t know about their websites and radio, but I doubt that the situation is much different.) They’re desperate for a neck-and-neck race, to hopefully keep people “glued.” We’ve seen how the coverage has been, with the relentless invention of Hillary Clinton “scandals” whenever she so much as blinks her eyelids, compared to the coddling of the most vile and repulsive, and unqualified and dangerous, presidential candidate, in historical context, in U.S. history.

I don’t believe that most of the Republicans or corporate Democrats who own and operate corporate media really want Donald Trump in the White House. But they figure that the chances of that are small, and they’re probably right. Probably. (More here and here.) But they are, in addition to ratings and web traffic and so forth, hoping to help mute any Democratic downballot wave. Plus, they’re a**holes. Of a truly fetid, repellent sort.

– We’ve known from Day One that Clinton has huge advantages among minorities, women…really, everyone except white people with no post-secondary education. I personally know Republicans who are refusing to vote for Trump, and I suspect that you do, too. Moreover, Clinton’s ground game is state-of-the-art, while it’s doubtful that Trump even knows what “microtargeting” is. It just does not add up that this is tied or anywhere near it.

Given the above, to claim that polling commissioned by, or otherwise intended for use by, corporate media and other public entities looking for attention – that is, most of what’s out there – is all on the up-and-up seems to me to be pretty naïve. I do indeed hypothesize (and I’m far from the first to do so) that in all likelihood much of it is being deliberately skewed, in order to make this thing appear closer than it is.

When people who at least try to be clear thinkers, rather than go through life in benighted fogs of motivated reasoning, are shown to be wrong, we endeavor to figure out what went wrong, in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes. (“Motivated reasoning” is basically all the mental gymnastics people do to justify believing what they want, based on dogma, emotionalism and cognitive biases, when said beliefs have little or no apparent grounding in fact and/or reason.) Sorry to sound all lecturing and pretentious.

When Donald Trump became the GOP presidential nominee, I believed that by this time, mid-September 2016, the only remaining question would be just how big the Democratic electoral tsunami would be. Kinda f*cked that up, didn’t I?

To be clear, I still believe that Hillary Clinton will win the Electoral College quite handily. And that it’s considerably more likely than not that we’ll take the U.S. Senate, although quite possibly with no more than 51 seats at best. And that we’ll take the MN House and have legislative majorities for Gov. Dayton’s final two years. And all of those will be wonderful things.

But, at least for now, the Landslide of Historic Proportions appears to be off. And the reason that I didn’t see that coming is that I had no idea that corporate media would take its coverage to the fetid extremes that it has, on behalf of both a misogynistic, racist, bloodthirsty, pathologically narcissistic lunatic, and on behalf of the wretched failure of a political party and ideology that he represents. I knew there would be plenty of bias, but not like this. For far from the first time I’ve underestimated how far the Establishment would go to try to protect its interests, even to the point of risking a Trump presidency and what that would mean. I should have known better by now, but I didn’t.

I did some polite, constructive criticism of corporate media the other day, as I have indeed been wont to do from time to time ever since I’ve been here. (Pushing seven years? Seriously? Hadn’t thought about it lately.) And I subsequently saw this.

Franken plainly said that Trump “is a liar . . . all the time.” Andrea Mitchell, sitting next to him, followed up by saying “Facts don’t seem to matter in this campaign. What has happened to our politics?” And Franken’s response was brilliant:

“I think they still matter. I still think, at the end of the day, they will still matter. And you know what, I would challenge you, all of you (pointing his finger at each of the reporters), to make them matter. To repeat them when there are lies. I would say that the media — you know, I used to write quaint books like ‘Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them’, and things like that, and I do think people think like, ‘Oh, wow, there used to be books about when people lied, and now no one cares.’ You guys have kind of a job to do.”

This may seem odd coming from me, but I think there actually is a pretty good chance that corporate media will to some extent turn against the Donald Trump campaign. (I was heartened to see that this morning’s dead tree Star Tribune front-page headlined the appalling Trump/Russia deal, instead of using the Dem convention as an excuse to bury it on the inside as I had expected.) In 2012, they were pro-Romney for quite a while, but for the last couple of months turned slightly pro-Obama, largely because of the correct perception that he was going to win handily. This being America, you know about how good it is for a profit margin to be associated with a loser.

Most, or at least many, media owners/bosses, though Republicans, likely don’t want a Trump presidency either. Not because of its effect on women, minorities, children, etc. – that would be their problem, let them deal with it – but because a Trump presidency would also ultimately be very bad for business. And they mostly are not such witless ninnies, at least not in some ways, that they don’t know that.

That cooked “scandals” about e-mail are being treated as far more important than the likes of this, says it all about the degraded nadir to which American corporate “journalism” has fallen. Hillary Clinton will likely wipe her bottom with Donald Trump anyway, come Election Day, but it still sucks.

And in all honesty a big factor in how pissed off I continually am about this is my own sense of helplessness. I cannot for the life of me figure out an effective way to force c. media to shape up. People have been showing for decades now what bulls*it it is. Many millions nonetheless still watch/read/listen, and believe the plutocratic, war pig propaganda that they are shamelessly fed.

This article is comprehensive, brutal, and undeniable. Click and read.

Over the last year there has been a recurrent refrain about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. More seriously, but relatedly, many believe Trump is an admirer and would-be emulator of Putin’s increasingly autocratic and illiberal rule. But there’s quite a bit more to the story. At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.(TPM)

Is Hillary Clinton (who I am certainly going to vote for) my dream candidate? No, I would not state the case that way. Among other things, if I could tell her to do one thing and she had to do it, it would be to put a hard swift boot on the a*ses of the neocowards that she inexplicably still has hanging around. She should know better. Anyone should, by now. Indeed, long since.

That being said, a study came out which confirms what a lot of us have pretty much known for a while. I’m putting it out here as good to throw in the faces of those who claim otherwise. Not that that generally works with those making those claims – motivated reasoning is very resistant to fact, that’s the whole point – but third parties might take note. Note that it’s from a department of the right-wing Kennedy School of Government.

“Far more negative?” More like insanely more negative! The study found that 84 percent of Clinton’s coverage has been “negative in tone” compared to just 43 percent for Trump and 17 percent for Sanders. Even though many of us would just (as soon) forget about Rafael Cruz at this stage, it’s notable to point out that he received fairly balanced press coverage in comparison to his opponent. So while the media insured their playing field was much more leveled, they didn’t afford us the same luxury.(Daily Kos)

Now, corporate media can’t really swing presidential elections. If it could, we’d be counting down President McCain’s (in all likelihood disastrous) time in the White House, and with VP Palin running well ahead in the polls as his successor. But this, and so much else, are nonetheless disgraceful failures when it comes to their alleged provision of legitimate journalism. What a f*cking joke.

I am embarrassed to the very roots of my thinning hair to admit that I did not until very recently know about the North Star Policy Institute. It was apparently started by Jeff Van Wychen, some time after the late, great MN2020 called it a day. Every progressive activist in the state should check the NSPI Facebook page or Twitter now and then for recent work, because nothing crushes conservative drivel, and humiliates its originators, like learned displays of reasoning from fact. A few recent items that I thought of particular note:

A recent publication from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce contains a list of claims regarding the level of business property taxes in Minnesota relative to other states: 49th “worst” (i.e., second highest) among the fifty states for rural commercial property taxes, 45th worst for metro commercial property taxes, and 40th worst for industrial property taxes. Startling? Definitely. Accurate? Not so much.

The property tax statistics cited by the Chamber are from the 50 State Property Tax Comparison Study 2014 from the “Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence” (MCFE). The first thing to note about this report is that it does not compare average metropolitan and rural property taxes within the fifty states. Rather, it compares a selected metro and rural city within each state. In Minnesota, metro (or urban) tax computations are based on Minneapolis, while rural computations are based on Glencoe, the seat of McLeod County.

Neither Minneapolis nor Glencoe are representative of their respective regions in terms of property taxes. For example, Minneapolis’ 2014 total local property tax rate is 19 percent higher than the average rate for the seven county metropolitan area, while Glencoe’s rate is a whopping 64 percent higher than the average rate for greater Minnesota.

Yeah, I rarely adorn my posts with titles like that. I’m generally more about just passing along information, and letting other people, who are better bloggers than me anyway, do the righteous hyperbole. But this one is worthy.

A group of parents backed by a national nonprofit say Minnesota’s teacher tenure laws perpetuate the state’s academic achievement gap between white students and students of color.

The group on Thursday filed a lawsuit that challenges Minnesota laws that make it more difficult to fire teachers once they’ve been employed for more than three years. The suit was filed in Ramsey County district court…

The state teachers’ union president Denise Specht said in a statement that the contested laws “protect teachers from discrimination and arbitrary punishment, including for speaking out about the learning conditions in their schools.”

Specht said the laws “explicitly do not protect ineffective teachers.”(MPR)

I did a bunch of blogging recently about efforts to destroy public education, and replace it with rote-learning mills to be strip-mined for profit. In the longer term, the intent is also to take control of curricula, and imbue young people with the purported glories of continued plutocratic, warmongering rule. That’s the right wing’s only chance, really, in the longer term, because young voters certainly aren’t buying that odious, failed, corrupt, reactionary crap, now.